book - Michel Roland on Diigo

22 Oct 09

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

03 Aug 09

Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker / Nicholson Baker

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e-reader kindle book

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.
Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.
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- He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn’t want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable—to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it “The Last Book.”
- A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
- The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.
- Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go.
- The iPod screen’s resolution, at a hundred and sixty-three pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace.

12 Mar 09

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker

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reading book

03 Dec 08

Courber le temps - Hors champ

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book reading attention for:cercamon

Ce matin-là, donc, une fille planquée dans le fond de la classe m'a balancé une question en forme de grenade: "Ça sert à quoi de lire des livres?"
De nos jours (me suis-je mis à réfléchir tout haut, en tétant mon café tiède), la plupart des objets culturels sont intégrés dans une approche multitâche. Autrement dit, on peut écouter de la musique en lavant la vaisselle, visionner un film en bavardant avec son voisin ou lire huit sites Web en simultanée.
Le livre, en revanche, demeure l'un des seuls objets culturels qui exigent de tout arrêter. Pour exister, il nécessite une attention exclusive. Impossible de lire un bouquin en pensant à autre chose.
Dans un monde multitâche, consacrer tout son temps à une seule activité revient à perdre son temps - ce qui explique sans doute en partie pourquoi on lit moins de livres qu'auparavant. L'intérêt du livre se trouve pourtant là: il exige certes plus d'effort, mais il dilate les heures.
Le livre est, en somme, une machine à courber le temps.
Voilà qui expliquerait d'ailleurs pourquoi le roman historique jouit en ce moment d'une telle popularité. Il s'agit au fond d'une métaphore de ce que le livre parvient à créer: une parenthèse temporelle avec sa propre logique, sa propre vitesse
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- Ils comprenaient pourquoi ils n'avaient pas envie de lire des livres, mais aussi pourquoi ils auraient pu en avoir envie.

10 Jun 08

The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books

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book readings library darnton

Students today still respect their libraries, but reading rooms are nearly empty on some campuses. In order to entice the students back, some librarians offer them armchairs for lounging and chatting, even drinks and snacks, never mind about the crumbs. Modern or postmodern students do most of their research at computers in their rooms. To them, knowledge comes online, not in libraries. They know that libraries could never contain it all within their walls, because information is endless, extending everywhere on the Internet, and to find it one needs a search engine, not a card catalog. But this, too, may be a grand illusion—or, to put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
the residual, nondigitized books could be important.
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- As Google signs up more libraries—at last count, twenty-eight are participating in Google Book Search—the representativeness of its digitized database will improve. But it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize.
- it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
- Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
- Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete, because obsolescence is built into the electronic media.
- Google will make mistakes.
- Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species.
- Nothing preserves texts better than ink imbedded in paper, especially paper manufactured before the nineteenth century, except texts written on parchment or engraved in stone. The best preservation system ever invented was the old-fashioned, pre-modern book.
- It now has a secret algorithm to rank Web pages according to the frequency of use among the pages linked to them, and presumably it will come up with some such algorithm in order to rank the demand for books. But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
- Google employs hundreds, perhaps thousands, of engineers but, as far as I know, not a single bibliographer. Its innocence of any visible concern for bibliography is particularly regrettable in that most texts, as I have just argued, were unstable throughout most of the history of printing.
- It is important to get the feel of a book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding. Its physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
- Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books.
- Most readers care about the text, not the physical medium in which it is embedded; and by indulging my fascination with print and paper, I may expose myself to accusations of romanticizing or of reacting like an old-fashioned, ultra-bookish scholar who wants nothing more than to retreat into a rare book room.
- But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books, quiet places in comfortable settings, where the codex can be appreciated in all its individuality.
- long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

02 Apr 08

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

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bibliothèque_numérique book digital_collection digital_library google_books lecture mediology médiologie reading

Without leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press
The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
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- s early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts.
- Six hundred years later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
- With electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius would have found natural.
- Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
- the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were filmed, and which remained in obscurity.
- It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,”
- The cataloguing data that identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
- If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million
- The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.
- Specialist engines like Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
- And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks.
- these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
- For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

31 Jan 08

La fin des livres ? - Nonfiction.fr le portail des livres et des idées

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apple book e-books e_readers reading steve_jobs

On ne peut que supposer, comme le fait le New York Times, que le PDG d’Apple comprend que la numérisation des livres (on pense surtout ici aux livres "poches" et aux livres de non fiction, les premiers étant par définition destinés à une lecture "nomade", les seconds seront ceux qui devraient le plus profiter des technologies numériques (les moteurs de recherches par exemple remplaceront peut-être les index)), devra à terme être intégré dans un objet plus large qui regroupera toutes les fonctionnalités que possède déjà un Iphone, par exemple.

29 Jan 08

http://www.liberation.fr - Finkielkraut: «L'enfant gâté a succédé à l'homme cultivé»

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book finkielkraut reading school

Je prends acte de cette mauvaise nouvelle : la démocratie est sortie de son lit et elle envahit des espaces où elle n’a rien à faire, notamment l’éducation et la culture. Or refuser la dissymétrie institutionnelle de l’école pour en faire une communauté éducative, c’est tuer l’école. Refuser la hiérarchie des valeurs esthétiques, la distinction entre la culture et l’inculture, ou même entre la beauté et la trivialité, c’est tuer la culture. Ce meurtre est-il de gauche ?
La beauté des livres, c’est qu’ils sont sans images et qu’ils offrent ainsi libre carrière à l’imagination. Quand on me raconte une histoire, j’ai besoin qu’on me donne à penser, qu’on me donne l’envie d’interrompre ma lecture et de lever la tête, pas qu’on dessine pour moi les héros. Mais les enfants gâtés veulent rester des enfants.

17 Dec 07

France Culture: Le savoir scolastique

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book france_culture history scholastic

A propos de : L’empire du livre, de Alain Boureau, Belles Lettres (2007), par Jacques Le Goff

L'Empire du livre - Pour une histoire du savoir scolastique (1200-1380), Les Belles Lettres

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book higher_education history scholastic

Le présent ouvrage propose une étude du sens et des moyens de l’activité de pensée lors d’un des beaux matins de l’Occident médiéval. Alain Boureau montre d’abord comment se forma une communauté intellectuelle, qui était aussi une corporation sociale, source de promotion et d’exclusion, d’exaltation libre et de dures contraintes.

L'Empire du livre

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book germany history

Frédéric Barbier

L'Empire du livre

le livre imprimé et la construction de l'Allemagne contemporaine (1815-1914)

Paris : Ed. du Cerf, 1995.
Traditionnellement important au sein de la société de l'espace germanique, l'écrit peut représenter une certaine entité culturelle
allemande avant même 1871, et, après cette date, devient le ciment d'une unification politique à consolider, voire à justifier.
Les professionnels du livre se voient donc investis d'une mission nationale : produire et diffuser largement le livre, symbole
de l'unité nouvelle ; d'où un effort de structuration de la librairie allemande et sa montée en puissance sciemment orchestrée
qui lui permet de s'imposer, à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale, et d'imposer sa prédominance sur le marché international.

01 Dec 07

Xmas tree made from books - Boing Boing

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book fun

25 Nov 07

Institut d'histoire du livre

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book history mediology

L'Institut d'histoire du livre organise régulièrement
des conférences, journées d'étude ainsi que des cours de perfectionnement
dans le but d'offrir un lieu de rencontre où peuvent dialoguer l'histoire
(des techniques, de l'économique,

de l'art), la sociologie, l'anthropologie, les sciences du langage et de
l'information.

Le livre comme forme symbolique

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book mediology

beaucoup de raisons qui pourraient laisser croire que l’invention du codex, dont on a les premiers témoignages à Rome au 1^er siècle après J.-C. fut une révolution qui rendit vite obsolète l’usage du rouleau, si malcommode, fragile et encombrant. Or, il n’en est rien. Le codex fut peu utilisé. Son usage, lent et progressif, ne remplaça le rouleau totalement que quatre siècles plus tard. Certes l’usage du papyrus ne favorisait pas l’usage du codex qui suppose de plier la feuille, ce que seul le parchemin pouvait supporter sans risque.
Deux certitudes pourtant dans ce mystère, mais certitudes contradictoires : le codex a été inventé à Rome pour diffuser des œuvres littéraires, tel que nous le décrit le poète Martial dans les années 80, en revanche, son développement coïncide exactement avec l’essor du christianisme qui l’adopta massivement : 158 des 160 fragments d’écrits chrétiens avant le IV^e siècle sont des codex
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- C’est peu dire que l’Évangile n’est pas un livre ordinaire. Il faut noter que la Torah, dans sa forme liturgique, est toujours un rouleau, protégé par un coffre et entouré des précautions qu’on doit à un objet sacré. L’Évangile, bien qu’il contienne des textes sacrés, reste un objet ordinaire et dont l’usage est personnel et obligatoire. Il y a donc vraisemblablement deux séries de raisons qui expliquent que le rouleau ait été, chez les chrétiens, remplacé par le codex, et pourquoi cette formule l’a emporté. Des raisons pratiques : le parchemin plié était déjà utilisé pour des fonctions domestiques comme les carnets de notes et les livres de comptes, plus facile à manipuler, à transporter et à conserver que le rouleau. Or, la religion chrétienne suppose un usage quotidien et individuel de l’Écriture sainte, ce qui a contribué à diffuser l’écriture, réservée aux lettrés, dans toutes les couches de la population. Le codex permet une appropriation du contenu qui adhère à son support, que l’on garde avec soi et que, d’une certaine façon, l’on s’incorpore par une pratique permanente.

Google Book Search

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book digital_libraries google moteur_de_recherche search search_engines tools

21 Nov 07

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

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book e-book kindle livre reading

The key revolutionary trait in the Kindle, however, is its wireless connection. The frequency of connection is neither local wifi or bluetooth, but cellular -- which means you can be online anywhere you can get a cellular signal (and you are off the net whereever there ain't a signal.) As a result of this connection the book is always on. As Jeff Bezos says, it turns the book into "a service, not a device."
the book's shift from noun to verb
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- The only question for me is, do I want to carry around another device? The immediate answer for me is: NO.

The Future of Electronic Paper - TFOT

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book e-paper e-reader volumen

A: I like to tell people that the holy grail of e-paper will be embodied as a cylindrical tube, about 1 centimeter in diameter and 15 to 20 centimeters long, that a person can comfortably carry in his or her pocket. The tube will contain a tightly rolled sheet of e-paper that can be spooled out of a slit in the tube as a flat sheet, for reading, and stored again at the touch of a button. Information will be downloaded—there will be simple user interface—from an overhead satellite, a cell phone network, or an internal memory chip. This document reader will be used for e-mail, the Internet, books downloaded from a global digital library that is currently under construction, technical manuals, newspapers (perhaps in larger format), magazines, and so forth, anywhere on the planet. It will cost less than $100, and nearly everyone will have one!

Transnets » Blog Archive » Livre 2.0: débat et passions

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book kindle lecture livre reading

“J’adore me poser sur un fauteuil confortable pour une longue lecture. A mesure que je me relaxe sur le fauteuil je me détends également dans les mots, les histoires et les idées de l’auteur. Le livre physique est un objet si élégant qu’il s’estompe à l’arrière-plan. Le papier, la colle, l’encre et les coutures qui font le livres disparaissent et ce qui reste est l’univers de l’auteur.”

interdisciplines : The Future of Web Publishing : Lorsque les écrits de réseaux cristallisent la mémoire des outils, des médias et des pratiques

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book illich lecture livre reading

Nous savons que le passage de l’oral
à l’écrit s’est notamment traduit dans notre société par un phénomène de sémiotisation
visuelle de la pratique à travers l’espace de la page. Autrement dit, si je
reprends les travaux d’Illich sur Le Didascalicon ou L’Art de lire
de Hugues de Saint Victor qui sont exemplaires en la matière, nous assistons
dans l’Occident médiéval, au tournant des XII^e et XIII^e
siècles, à la deuxième révolution fondamentale du livre ; la première étant
liée au passage du volumen au codex[21].

documents de travail

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book hypertext

Groupe de travail "écritures hypertextuelles"

Michel Roland's Library tagged book → View Popular

THE ELECTRONIC BOOK BURNING by Alan Kaufman (Evergreen Review No. 120, October 2009)

Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker / Nicholson Baker

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker

Courber le temps - Hors champ

The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

La fin des livres ? - Nonfiction.fr le portail des livres et des idées

http://www.liberation.fr - Finkielkraut: «L'enfant gâté a succédé à l'homme cultivé»

France Culture: Le savoir scolastique

L'Empire du livre - Pour une histoire du savoir scolastique (1200-1380), Les Belles Lettres

L'Empire du livre

Xmas tree made from books - Boing Boing

Institut d'histoire du livre

Le livre comme forme symbolique

Google Book Search

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

The Future of Electronic Paper - TFOT

Transnets » Blog Archive » Livre 2.0: débat et passions

interdisciplines : The Future of Web Publishing : Lorsque les écrits de réseaux cristallisent la mémoire des outils, des médias et des pratiques

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